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A few weeks ago, a discussion on twitter led to the suggestion of an ITIL Manifesto. An attempt to codify and simplify the core tenets of ITIL from the triple perspectives of experience, theory and aspiration.

Some of the discussions since have talked about a manifesto as a way of remembering, communicating and promoting those principles and values to colleagues, customers and other key stakeholders. They should be broad enough to cover the essence of 2000 pages of ITIL, but grounded enough and easy enough to remember so that the swamped professional can take a step back, think, remember that principle and answer from a position of best practice pragmatism rather than theoretical fanaticism.

Some people have focused on using the manifesto as a way of steering a possible next version of ITIL (if there’s even going to be one), others have argued that it’s a way of making V3/2011 more accessible. Some have argued that it should be an ITSM manifesto, others that it should be ITIL (a vote on the now-closed tricider stream was 5-2 in favour of ITIL) although with only 7 votes out of the 928 unique visits it obviously wasn’t a hugely contentious issue.

AXELOS have been brilliant in supporting us in this. They’ve actively helped drive the twitter discussions, they’ve posted updates to their website and the Head of ITIL practice – Kaimar Karu – has been involved in the community discussions. They’ve not tried to steer the content, but seem happy to let it evolve and grow where it needs to.

The community have likewise been brilliant. Over a hundred suggestions were gathered in the first phase from a diverse range of people. The well known ITSM leaders and authorities have contributed with energy, but have also in more than one case suggested they themselves step back and let fresh voices be heard.

This is where you come in. Yes you, reading this now.

The fresh voices mentioned are the people who haven’t necessarily been active in the ITIL or ITSM community to date, or maybe have been but want to step it up. It could be non-IT professionals who have opinions about IT Service Management. It could be CIOs, DBAs or developers who think we’ve got it all wrong. It could be experienced consultants who have been working so hard at solving problems that they’ve not realised there was an ITIL manifesto initiative and have some 24-carat solid gold insights which ITIL didn’t even know it needed – until now.

The opportunities to get involved are there for everyone. Now that we’ve gathered a mass of raw ideas, it’s time to group them, distil them and craft them into principles or manifesto statements. I’d like to offer multiple routes to do this – both traditional “join a working group” and the less traditional “here’s the original material, go away and self-organise – you’ve got 3 weeks.”

The first meeting of the original few volunteers/contributors is tonight, where I’ll be advocating for all of the above and so, I believe, will all the other participants. We’ll mostly be talking about how we organise and coordinate and who’s going to do the admin-y stuff. I’m going to set up some wider discussions following on from that (Google Hangouts is max 10 active participants) so stay tuned.

If you want to be a part of ITIL’s present, and maybe influence its future, get involved now.

In business, data is always an asset. Information is an essential. Knowledge and wisdom are the key outputs of both. As a business grows, it should harvest good quality data and information that form shared knowledge and wisdom across all departments and teams.

The concept of knowledge can be illustrated nicely by the DIKW Pyramid, a simple model that has endured for more than three decades. Without knowledge management, information is not retained and wisdom can never be developed.

But what do we mean by closed loop feedback? And how does it benefit our knowledge management systems?

Open v Closed Loop

First, let’s define an open loop as opposed to a closed loop.

When a customer makes a complaint, they’re normally motivated by:

The desire to correct an injustice

The desire to get something off their chest

The desire to influence change so that they don’t have the same experience again (or to save others experiencing the problem)

The third reason is the one the business should be interested in. Customer satisfaction is a driving force behind ROI, and a happy customer is more likely to repurchase (or spread positive vibes) than a customer who is not.

Closed Loop in Context

Open Loop Versus Closed Loop (simplified)

Using closed loops is effective when dealing with technical problems.

For example, when using a help system, the customer is motivated by a problem with a system or service. If they don’t find the solution in the help system, they may go elsewhere, become frustrated, write a bad review or make a complaint to the head of department.

Repeated complaints mean more admin, fewer happy customers and, ultimately, a help system that is less effective.

By closing the loop, the business can use feedback effectively. It can filter out actions from complaints and turn them into positives that inflict real change. The knowledge manager then has useful feedback that they can use to review the quality of the help article and improve it.

Why is this a better outcome?

The loop has been closed with a meaningful resolution.

The customer feels that their feedback was taken on board.

Other customers benefit from improved knowledge.

The business benefits from improved knowledge retention.

The Knowledge Manager benefits from improved insight.

The Knowledge Manager has fewer complaints.

To facilitate this, the knowledge tool needs the necessary functionality to collect useful feedback. Ideally, it must have:

A rating system that allows fast feedback. Three or five star ratings are adequate; any more could be confusing.

A form that invites freeform text comments. Ideally, the comment form should encourage submissions by being quick and easy to use, avoiding excessive form fields or questions.

Active review and prioritisation of comments submitted, as part of the ordinary Service Desk process, and feedback to the customer when articles are updated.

Measuring and capturing value from your knowledge

The value to your organisation and customers from good quality knowledge is hard to overstate:

Customer-facing knowledge can empower service users to resolve their own issues without contacting the service desk; this also cuts costs for the service desk and frees them up to focus on other customers.

Knowledge created and delivered to the service desk can improve first-call-closure rates (satisfaction/cost) and direct call logging agents to ask the right questions for specific incident types. This allows second and third line teams to get the right information up front (speeding up resolution times, and thus customer satisfaction).

More abstract knowledge (overviews of technologies, system architectures) can empower junior IT staff to learn more about the services on offer, and may provide opportunities for them to add context to patterns of incidents and thus contribute more effectively to problem management.

Measuring this value is also possible. As well as basic knowledge metrics and KPIs:

increase in KB article rating over time

decrease in KB articles flagged for review

# links of KB articles to incident records

# views of each article

etc…

Stakeholders can also compare these to incident metrics and KPIs, which will give them a reasonable indication of correlation (if not ultimate proof of causation) of the positive link between knowledge and stability of service (and customer perception thereof).

Being able to tell (and evidence to) the Head of Service that your knowledgebase has converted 50 days effort of an expensive 3rd line resource into 25 days of a junior service desk analyst whilst simultaneously increasing customer satisfaction from reduced resolution times is a powerful step in demonstrating value capture.

Changes are decisions, balancing risk and reward. In the language of Decision Theory, they are classed as normative or prescriptive decisions (i.e. identifying the best decision to take) which rely on access to good information and are best made rationally (rather than irrationally, emotionally or because there’s an expensive marketing campaign about to start that nobody told IT about). The processes and tools used to analyse decisions and their outcomes are usually referred to as Decision Support Systems, and can be technological, procedural, or a combination.

For IT changes, the Decision Support System is the change policy, process, tool and the people who manage, review and approve them. Using these, it’s possible to take one big decision (“should we do this change?”) and carve it into smaller and more manageable decisions, e.g.:

Is the Request For Change correctly filled out with meaningful information?

Has the technical peer review been completed?

Is there a compelling benefit case?

Has the change been tested?

Is there a fully resourced and tested implementation and remediation plan?

Will it clash with another change?

etc etc.

Most of these smaller decisions are human and procedural, though technological quality gates can be included too, such as simulated code builds, static code analysis outputs, configuration data etc.

By splitting bigger decisions into smaller ones, it’s possible to spread the burden of decision-making across several people, although care must be taken to avoid making all of the sub-decisions in isolation (or being overly reliant on theoretical models as per the Ludic Fallacy) – which is why the ultimate decision (“should we do this change?”) is best taken in the context of the real world situation in your organisation – you and I know this as the CAB.

Most change managers and change approvers know this concept of splitting up big decisions intuitively, which is why we reject poor quality change records, ask for peer reviews, demand to see a test completion report and make people wait for CAB.

The concept of a change process then is a good one. It leads the requestors, assessors and approvers through a logical sequence of smaller decision-making until there is enough information to make that ultimate decision in a relatively straightforward manner with good information to base it on. This process can take days, especially as many of the smaller-decision makers have day jobs, which is why many organisations have weekly scheduled CABs and cutoff dates.

But the benefit of smaller decisions is missing from emergency changes because they simply don’t have time – they’re emergencies. The smaller decisions end up getting rushed (“well, it’s got half an implementation plan, and we tested a bit of it, is that good enough?”) and the burden of the smaller decisions gets pushed to the emergency change approver – which despite good intentions in your emergency change policy can end up being a single senior manager, or sometimes the change manager alone.

If this happens once a month, it’s probably not a big deal. The person who ends up being asked to decide might take a little time to ask a few people their opinions, form an emergency CAB, push back on some shoddy testing, rework the implementation plan, speak to the business and so on. But if it happens several times a day, that person is going to get fatigued, stressed, and ultimately end up making bad decisions.

And this is the problem with having too many emergency changes. Bad or rushed decisions either mean blocking something the business really needs through being too risk averse, or present an unnecessarily high risk to your production services by being too relaxed.

Having read a few posts on various social media sites about people looking for combined lists of ITSM events and not finding much apart from the vendors’ own sites, I decided to make one.

Bear in mind that my coding skills are rudimentary, in fact watching me try to write code is probably like watching a dog learn to play chess, so all the hard work was actually done by my wife…

The end result is http://www.itsmevents.com and there’s a link at the bottom if you want to submit your own event. A few additional features are planned over the next few weeks, but it’s intended to be a simple list of ITSM events.

The ITIL® Expert qualification, the penultimate award in the ITIL stack, is not easy, but it is achievable, and if you put in the study time, and pay attention, then it is fairly straightforward.

Contrary to popular belief, there aren’t any nasty trick questions. There are tough questions in the intermediate exams and higher, but tough in a way that gives you an unclear choice between picking the answer that is ‘most ITIL’ or ‘best answers the question/case study’.

Your first choice, after deciding to pursue the Expert qualification (either from start to finish or over a number of years as I did) is which route to take.

There are 3 main routes to your Expert qualification:

1. Conversion from V2 Manager

As a single course/qualification, this was retired in 2011. However for those who missed the boat and hold the V2 manager’s cert, there is an expedited route to ITIL Expert:

ITIL Foundation / Foundation Bridge, then

ITIL Intermediate Lifecycle : Service Strategy OR Continual Service Improvement, then

ITIL Managing Across Lifecycle (MALC)

2. The direct Lifecycle or Capability paths

This involves taking the following exams:

ITIL Foundation

All ITIL Intermediate Lifecycle or all Capability certificates

Managing Across the Lifecycle

You’ll notice that you get a choice in step 2. The Lifecycle qualifications are aimed more at the consultant or manager, whereas the Capability qualifications are aimed more at the practitioner.

There are other differences as well. If you choose to study for these in the classroom, then the Lifecycle courses are all 3 days each so you’ll spend 15 days out of the office. The Capability courses are 5 days each so you’ll spend 20 days. This can be an added cost for contractors & consultants (on daily rates) or those who have limited training days available.

Cost of the courses is another consideration. A quick check of the list prices for each course on a popular UK training provider’s website shows Lifecycle courses costing £1245 and Capability courses costing £2300. This means that the Lifecycle route will cost you £6225, and Capability £9200. And you still need to pay for the foundation and MALC whichever route you choose. Even if you go down the Lifecycle route, you’re not getting much change from £10k – though this gets a lot cheaper when done via online learning (more on this later).

Note that if you’re paying for this yourself as an individual rather than a company, tell the salesperson when you call for a quote – they usually do discounts of 20 – 30% for individuals, and multi-course discounts are also available. Discounts tend to be greater in Q2 and Q3 of each year when training budgets have been spent (or held on to). Also make sure you ask about free re-sits in case you don’t do well on your first attempt.

3. Indirect path (mixture of Capability, Lifecycle & others)

The final route to Expert is a hybrid approach. You can combine Lifecycle and Capability qualifications as well as some of the shorter specialist courses to get the credits you need – but be careful. Where there is overlap in the various syllabuses, the examiner does discount the point scores for individual certificates as explained in the following links:

The routes to ITIL Expert are summarised in the diagram near the top of this page, and there’s also a very good diagram by Peter Lijnse at ServiceManagementArt available here which also shows how the topics are carved up differently between the 5 Lifecycle and 4 Capability courses.

What about online?

It’s possible to go from novice to Expert via online-only study. But should you? There are major cost benefits (up to 65% off the price of classroom) to studying online and online delivery & examination methods are maturing rapidly, though make sure you stick to reputable and accredited training organisations. Some recommendations are included later.

Foundation

Studying ITIL Foundation online is both cost & time effective and can be a very viable option for many people. It’s also the easiest of the ITIL qualifications, though what it lacks in depth, it more than makes up for in breadth. You’ll cover a lot of concepts in a short space of time, and the main value I found in the classroom was in having the instructor give a joined up overview of the whole end to end lifecycle.

You can order ITIL online training from many providers, or buy single books / complete certification kits from online retailers.

Booking & taking the foundation exam is also pretty straightforward – one of the main popular providers is Prometric/EXIN.

Google will show many online training providers, but if you want a recommendation then check out ITIL Training Zone for Online ITIL Foundation Courses.

Intermediates & MALC

Taking the intermediate exams online is a little bit more involved. Whereas for the foundation you could just read a book and rock up to a test centre, for intermediates you need to have studied via an accredited training provider (ATO) and for a minimum length of time.

There are some ATOs who are accredited to deliver online training however, such as ITIL Training Zone who deliver the full range of online ITIL courses.

Taking exams online from your own home or office is also possible. You can usually sit a webcam-proctored exam, and some exam boards even offer the chance to have an independant third party monitor you whilst you sit an online exam (with dedicated software which locks the mouse/keyboard to the exam app and fails you if you exit the application). It is also possible to go and sit (once you’ve paid) one of the classroom exams run by other training companies as long as you have you attendance certificate from the online ATO (though this policy may vary from company to company – check first).

Having taken Service Operations via the online route, I’d recommend it for anyone who finds self-paced learning preferable, or who doesn’t want to take the time off work, or who already understands the material well and just needs it formalising before taking the exam. It’s also a lot cheaper. Most of the core learning courses are around $500, rising to $800 or so for the full package including exam prep questions and the exam voucher.

Seriously consider getting the exam prep kits. They’ll clue you into the question formats and get you used to thinking the right way. Where the foundation was a fairly easy multiple choice with one right / three wrong answers, the Intermediate exam questions have 4 right answers, but some are more right than others.

10 ITIL Intermediate and MALC exam tips

1. Study. Not just the specific course, but scan back over the foundation material as well.

2. Take practice exams and read the answer rationales. You may not agree with the rationales, I didn’t for half of them, but they give useful guidance on what the examiners are looking for.

4. Don’t change your answer unless you made a blindingly obvious mistake, but even then be careful. Unless you have a good 10 minutes left on the clock to really get back into a question in detail, leave it.

5. The best answer is usually the one that gets 3 things right: it’s the most ‘ITIL’, it best matches the case study, it best answers the specific question.

6. Because ITIL focuses on value, answers which talk about ‘value’ or ‘business value’ can be words to look out for in correct answers – but don’t rely on this, especially if you can’t make the rest of the answer work.

7. If going down the Lifecycle route, take Service Strategy & CSI last before your MALC. Strategy & CSI have the most overlap with the MALC syllabus and will be fresh in your mind.

8. For Lifecycle exams, avoid the answer which rushes in and starts doing things. The best answer is usually one that takes a step back and considers the whole situation and thinks more strategically (exception if the word ‘tactical is used’).

9. Avoid answers which involve some kind of ‘wacky scheme’ (like starting your own IT Hardware business when the question was asking about problem management).

10. Don’t mistake ITIL world for your world or experiences. Just because you’d do it one way doesn’t mean ITIL will.

DevOps. The next saviour of the world. A combination of agile delivery and super-effective provisioning scripts with a sprinkling of software-defined (virtual) infrastructure.

Whilst ITIL v3 and 2011 seem (on the surface at least) to support a waterfall approach, it’s imperative to step back and think for a second.

The concept of identifying a need for change to your service portfolio hasn’t altered. It still relies on identifying demand and building a decent relationship with your customers.

You still need to design it, and you’ll still need to operate it and continually improve it.

The biggest difference here is your transition strategy, transition design and the execution of transition. If you have waterfall style release policies and service validation practices then these won’t be capable of dealing with DevOps style Continuous Deliveries out the box. Sure, you can slice and dice your delivery packages down into smaller and smaller pieces, but this is still going to be at odds with the kinds of flexibility DevOps promises.

So let’s step back to Service Strategy and Service Design. In a traditional waterfall approach, an example of a high level transition plan is:

Delivery

Contents

Delivery 1 (June)

Functional requirements a, b & c.

Pair of DB servers, single application server, single web server, no loadbalancer.

Non-functional requirements x,y,z meeting 75% of targets.

Documents 1,2 & 3.

Ops briefing at t-3 weeks.

ELS to +5 days

Delivery 2 (Nov)

additional functional requirements d, e & f.

Additional webserver with loadbalancer.

Non-functional requirements x,y,z meeting 90% of targets.

Documents 4,5 & 6.

Full training plan from t- 5 weeks

ELS to +15 days

These are packages. Discrete units. Similar to this site’s logo (which may need to change now!). You have built entire releases comprising some software components, some hardware, some documents, some knowledge transfer into a bundle. And this works really well for big deliveries, and even slicing these up into smaller 2-3 week deliveries is possible albeit with some overhead.

But what about daily? What about the developers with testers sat next to them checking in quality tested code on a daily basis to an automated build server, having it integrated, auto test packs run and then pushed to production? How are you going to slice release packages across multiple developers cutting code for variable prioritised lists of business requirements?

Packages now become unwieldy. You need a different transition strategy, and a different transition design, and you need to execute them differently from the packaging or bundling concept.

How? Rather than a conveyor belt of packaged releases, this becomes concurrent streams of smaller deliverables, for example:

Stream

Frequency

Roles /
Processes

1 – Code objects checked in, tested & deployed

Daily

R&DM, SACM

2 – Knowledge updates created & tested for the new functional requirements

Every other day

SACM, SV&T, Knowledge Management

3 – Formal Operational acceptance tests

1-2 times/week

SV&T, SLM, BRM, App/Tech Function Managers

4 – Hardware deliveries

As required

R&DM, Tech Mgmt

5 – ELS & Continual Service Improvement

Daily

CSI, SLM, BRM, Service Owner

You’ll notice that I’ve referenced existing ITIL processes, functions and roles. We’re still using best practices (or good practices if you prefer) which are tailored to your organization and may need to be tailored for this approach. But the concept of creating a new knowledge CI and linking it to a functional requirement doc, service & hardware CIs and accounting for its status and verifying it is not new.

You need good tooling, you need reasonably mature Config Management and ditto for knowledge management, but there’s no reason why if it isn’t already happening in your organisation that you can’t use your DevOps approach to implement good config & knowledge management at the same time.

Change Management is still change management. Very little needs to (pardon the pun) change. It still acts as an approval/authorisation broker at various stages over the lifecycle, it can still devolve production release approval to the automated build and integration test process. But this is a policy addition driven by your transition (and service) strategy, not a whole new process.

You’ll also notice I’ve lumped ELS (Early Life Support) and CSI together. ELS never ends under this approach. But think back to the joining of Dev and Ops and you’ll realise that ELS loses significance. I’ve kept it here because there are some really good ELS practices you’ll want to keep: good defect/incident management at a heightened level with a razor-sharp focus on issues caused by change, regular sunrise/sunset meetings with sponsors and business owners. But I’ve merged it with CSI because this complements the very nature of Agile and also crucially gives you a perfect opportunity for a closed-loop feedback system into either operational, tactical or strategic improvements on a daily basis.

So you don’t need a dedicated DevOps process. You need a DevOps -focused transition strategy, design and execution. You need sensible tweaks to existing processes and policies. You need good tools for build, test, config and knowledge. You need good practices and good leadership.

You can do all of this with existing ITIL, just as you can with any other framework.

I recently discussed service support / operations on twitter with someone frustrated at being asked to provide support for a public cloud service he had very little ability to. Not technical capability, because he seemed capable enough, but access to the systems to do more fundamental fixes. We didn’t get far into the details, but it seemed he was being asked to deal with something which hadn’t been thought about when the service was provisioned.

This is sadly not an uncommon situation among support teams who often have no say in the choice of system/service, no time to get familiar with it, and no means of pushing back on critical gaps even if they do get a chance to see it beforehand. These are often gaps that a 5 year old could often spot, let alone experienced engineers but which seem to be frequently ignored by people whose shopping list only has one thing on it: functionality.

I just read an article on an ITSM blog I stumbled across where the author briefly discusses the confusion that can arise when people talk about different types of change.

The author raises a valid point about operational change versus standard change etc. and this is a problem I’ve run into in the past.

So let me give you the way I solve it.

There are two things we need to define here:

Attribute = how you describe a change in terms of priority, impact, type, category etc

Process / Route To Production (R2P) = how you deal with a change which can be described by a combination of one or more attributes – eg. Normal change, operational change, standard change, emergency change, service request….

There are many reasons why releases fail. Maybe your test pack wasn’t scoped properly or that harmless application patch from the vendor removed a key piece of functionality. All of these pale in terms of avoidability and regularity in comparison to the following conversation:

Requestor: “I want this change to go into the release.”

Release Manager: “Sorry, the scope has closed, we’re scoping the next one though.”